 the show for people who care about their health and the health of our planet on the Think Tech Live Streaming Network series. I'm your host, Dr. Grace O'Neill. Joining me today is Dr. Sophie Wrisky, veterinarian at the Pacific Marine Mammal Center. Today we're going to talk about monk seals. So let's get into it. What kind of work does a Pacific Marine Mammal Center do? So the Marine Mammal Center operates the largest marine mammal rehabilitation hospital in the world and we're primarily located in California, we do have a facility here on the big island of Hawaii as well. And we have over 40 years of experience now in caring for a variety of marine mammal species. And the organization was started by a small group of dedicated and passionate volunteers that wanted to make an impact on marine mammal health and to help animals in need. And we've grown significantly since then. Our Hawaii hospital was opened in 2014 and it was purpose-built to care for Hawaiian monk seals specifically. Can you show us some pictures, Mike, of the facility and maybe Dr. Wrisky can let us know what each picture is of? Yeah, so this is a picture of our animal care facility. This is where we can house monk seals that are presented to us for a variety of different reasons, but primarily they come to us needing care for different diseases or injuries and they can stay in this area. So this is one of our pools and they have a lot of haul-out space and some area to rest, but also a pool that they can swim in and get some exercise. And it's all completely covered, affectionately known as the burrito. We're located very close to the airport. So if you're looking down and see something that looks vaguely like a burrito, that's us. Again, this is just another shot of inside that animal care facility where we bring Hawaiian monk seals from across the Hawaiian archipelago. So we are the only facility that's permitted by NOAA for long-term care of Hawaiian monk seals specifically. So we will get animals from all of the Hawaiian islands and come to us for care. Just one of our lovely patients. You can see they're very interioring and they wiggle their way right into your heart very quickly. This is a photo of an animal coming or getting a physical exam. So every animal that's brought to us, we do a full work up. So in general, when an animal is identified as needing care, we have an idea of what might be going on with that animal. There's a reason that we're gonna rescue that animal and bring them in to evaluate them. But once they do get here, we do a full comprehensive physical, very much like an annual physical exam that a person would get. Just to check them over, make sure there are other underlying conditions in addition to the primary reason that they've come to us for care. And you can see this is a couple of our dedicated volunteers working with one of our Hawaiian Monk Steel patients. As a nonprofit organization, we rely heavily on a dedicated core of volunteers that come in and they do both animal care as well as response. And this is a group of our volunteers going in and just gently moving one of our animals from one pen to another so that we can clean that space. We work very hard to just interact in a minimal way so you can see these crowding boards help us to both keep our volunteers safe, but also to kind of interrupt that human form and create a little bit of distance between us and those animals. They are wild animals, so we are very careful in the way that we interact with them. So I'm sorry, can I ask a question? Yeah, of course. I was wondering with the volunteers, I know you guys are having a volunteer drive, but I think this will air afterward, but can people still, after the volunteer drive, decide they want to volunteer? Yes, we have recruitment periods throughout the year. So just because this volunteer drive is ending soon, there will be others throughout the year. We encourage you to check the website, the marine mammalcenter.org. Check us out there and just see if there's a volunteer drive going on. We love recruiting and welcoming new members to the Marine Mammal Center, Ohana. And we are always looking for folks to help us in this really important mission. How about in other islands? I mean, I know you guys are located on the big island, but say somebody wanted to volunteer on Oahu or Kauai or another island, would that be possible? Absolutely, that's a great question. And our organization, the Marine Mammal Center, is just preparing to start coordinating response on Maui Island. So we are expanding over there and we are looking for volunteers there. So please do, again, check out our website, marinemammalscenter.org, to see if you can come and help us either on the big island or on Maui. And then we do work with other partner organizations throughout the main Hawaiian islands that are doing similar work. So each island has an organization that you can volunteer with. And we encourage you to check them out too. They're all wonderful partners helping in this same mission to help conserve Hawaiian monk seals. And what kind of training do the volunteers have to go through? And what kind of things do the volunteers actually help with? Yeah, so we have two primary core groups of volunteers. One is focused on animal care. And those are the ones that are here working in our hospital. And they help us to care for any of the sick or injured animals that come to us. So primarily helping us feed those monk seals, making sure they're getting their medications, conducting observations to make sure that we're not seeing any strange behaviors or things like that. And providing them with enrichment items to kind of stimulate their natural thinking and natural feeding processes. And then we also have a group of volunteers that conducts response. And a lot of what that is is public outreach. So we're asking these volunteers to go out. And whenever we get a report of a Hawaiian monk seal that's hauled out, those volunteers go and they establish a seal awareness zone around that seal. So they put up signs and they hang out with that seal and just educate members of the public, both from Hawaii or visiting tourists to be able to just share a little bit of information about monk seals and also to help protect and make sure that those monk seals are getting the rest that they need and making sure that folks don't get too, too close. So if somebody does get close to a monk seal, what can happen to them? So monk seal. What can happen to the monk seal, I should say. It's both, it's both. So monk seals are wild animals and any wild animal, if it feels threatened can certainly present a risk to a human that gets too close. So they can bite, they do carry some nasty bacteria in their mouth that could potentially cause an infection. So certainly it's important for us to keep our distance from a human safety perspective, but it's also very important for us to keep our distance for those monk seals because when they're hauled out, that's an important rest time for them. So they have to spend a significant amount of energy foraging and getting the nutrition that they need on a daily basis. When they're hauled out, that's their rest time. And the more we disturb them, the more we're gonna interrupt that rest and that can lower their fitness and their overall wellbeing. And it's especially important for mothers and pups. So if you have a mother and pup, she's gonna be hauled out taking care of that pup and more disturbance can disrupt that bond, disrupt important nursing periods, which is really critical. And that's a critical time period for that pup to really be able to grow and get ready for life on its own in the wild. So especially with mother and pups, but all monk seals, we certainly want folks to keep their distance so that they can get their much needed rest. So when you say hauled out, is that something they do every day or what exactly does that mean hauled out? Yeah, hauled out means just laying on the beach, sunbathing is the closest thing that we would equate it to. So monk seals will spend hours at a time hauled out not necessarily every day, but often every day they have a period of rest where they're just relaxing on the beach, sleeping in the sand, sometimes sleeping on lava rocks and it looks horribly uncomfortable to us, but they seem perfectly uncomfortable, or perfectly comfortable just hanging out in that space. They do blend in very well, the lava rock as well. So if you're out there, just be aware that those monk seals can be out there and you can come up on one very quickly all of a sudden. So just make sure to take a step back if you encounter one. So sorry, I guess I interrupted the picture showing. So let's go back to the, here's Mike and we'll show the other pictures. Oh yeah, so this is a photo of a transport. So again, I mentioned we get Hawaiian monk seals coming to us from all of the Hawaiian islands and we partner very closely with no fisheries, but also the US Coast Guard. They have been the ones that have carried the heavy lifts in terms of being able to transport animals between islands. So often we'll get, we'll partner with them to fly the monk seals from whichever island they've stranded on to us here in Kona, DSU 130. So we're very grateful for that partnership as it allows us to really expand our care for these animals. Again, another photo of transport. So you can see monk seals are quite heavy, so we need a fair number of people to give them a fair number of trucks. As adults, they can be 300, 400 pounds, 600 pounds. We do have one adult female here on the big island that we estimate is about 800 pounds. Oh my gosh. She's unusually large, but they can get very, very big. So we need some assistance getting them in and out of our vehicles and then in and out of planes. All right, so this is an example of bat seal awareness zone. So when we have a monk seal, hold out like this. So resting on the beach, relaxing near the shore, we'll place these signs at an appropriate distance to kind of notify members of the public that there's a monk seal resting in this space and to please keep your distance and allow them to have that safe space. And here's a wonderful action shot of our youth and school programs manager, Wendy. And she is a wonderful part of our team. We do have education programs that reach middle school students to try to share more about the Hawaiian monk seal cause. And again, I encourage you to get back to our website. We have some wonderful resources there that are available to teachers, some virtual and online resources that people can use to help share those stories. So I encourage you to get in touch. And here's a photo of a young monk seal pup hiding in the rocks so you can see how they blend in. So why don't we play that vocalization right now? And if you could tell us about vocalizations and if they do that at a young age, do they communicate with all the different other seals in the water? Is it mostly in monk families? It's been here that the barking sound and we often hear that with our younger animals, especially. But any monk seal can make that barking sound as a warning to get, don't get too, too close. They also make a really interesting whooping sounds that I don't think we actually have recorded similar sorts of stories. And in general, monk seals tend to be relatively solitary so you don't necessarily hear them talking back and forth. They're not like a California sea lion where you see a lot of interaction, a lot of barking. Monk seals tend to be a little bit more solitary, but when you have younger animals, especially the juveniles interacting, even with adults, you'll hear those vocalizations a lot more. So these monk seals, they're solitary from their whole life after they're weaned, essentially? For the most part. And you'll see them in similar areas and you will see occasionally individuals interacting, but they don't have close social groups where they hang out or haul out together for extended periods of time. They will interact, but it's more of a solitary lifestyle. And I guess for our viewers and just for a reminder for myself, how can you tell the difference between a seal and a sea lion? Yeah, that's a great question. So seals tend to have a lower profile on the beach, whereas a sea lion has these big, strong front flippers and a pelvis that can actually rotate up underneath them. So the sea lions, you can actually see kind of walking on land, they'll get up on those front flippers and they have that taller profile and a long neck and they walk around. Whereas a monk seal or any of the other true seals, they do something called galumping, which is as awkward as it sounds. So they're inchworming along the beach. So it's a different kind of movement, different kind of motion, much lower profile. And one of the easiest things to look for is if you look at a seal space versus a sea lion space, sea lions have ear flaps. So you'll see actually an extended ear flap that comes out from the sides of their head, whereas true seals don't have those. So it's all a smooth profile. That's one of the key things that you can look for when trying to identify a sea lion versus a seal. Do we have sea lions in Hawaii or do we only have seals? We do not. We only have the Hawaiian monk seal. It's the only in Kamek, Pinnipet or seal or sea lion species here, but occasionally you will get a wayward sea lion that can potentially make its way over here. So there was one a few years ago that made its way over, but very, very unusual. They don't live here naturally. And I'm wondering with the monk seals being endangered, what were the main factors driving that and the decrease in populations if you could talk about that? Yeah, so they were hunted down to the brink of the population. So very much a human pressure that dropped that population down. And then that created a genetic bottleneck and they created the small population that had a harder time recovering from the impacts of hunting. And now they face a number of different threats as they're not being hunted of course, they're endangered, so they are protected species. But here in the main Hawaiian islands, they still face a significant number of threats that are related to human activities. So in interactions with fishing gear, as well as a disease called toxoplasmosis that spread from domestic cats. So again, something that we brought over. And of course, climate change is another impact that we're having on the planet that is causing trouble or causing difficulties in that population being able to recover. So how does climate change cause difficulties in seals being able to recover? Is it their food that they're not able to get? It could potentially be the food. The impact that we're seeing, at least the most right now within the Hawaiian archipelago is in the northwestern Hawaiian islands. So some of those more isolated areas where some of those islands are really just sand spits, but they're important rookery spaces. So the spaces where mothers will go to have their pups. And as sea levels rise and as we get more and more frequent storms, you get more erosion of those areas. So there's less safe space for those animals to have their pups. So we both don't have space for those pups to be born, but it also makes them more vulnerable to predators like sharks because they're closer to the water's edge and will venture in a little bit more or could get washed off by a wave and get picked off by a shark. So. Jeez, how about the, I always wondered what the toxo because I don't think that seals are in close proximity to cats, but maybe the cats are pooping on the beach. Is that how the seals get the toxo? Yeah, so that's a great question. We don't know exactly what the route of transmission is, but because there are so many feral cats, there is a significant amount of cat feces around. And whenever there's winter storms or rains coming through that can get washed down into the coastal environment. We do see that with sea otters in California that's the suspected route of that parasite making it into their ocean home. And then it doesn't take very many of that particular parasite to cause an infection within an animal. So that we think that's where they're encountering it is really likely to be coming from a rainwater runoff. Oh, geez. And how about the, does it affect the brain? Is that the main thing, the toxo? Yeah, so it can impact the brain like in humans and other animal species, but in monk seals because they haven't evolved with this particular parasite called a protozole parasite. They actually have a very systemic reaction to it. So it gets into different organ systems, multiple organ systems and causes really significant inflammation. And they have a very poor prognosis. Unfortunately, if they don't have the capacity or the immunity to be able to deal with that particular parasite and then often leads to death of that animal if they've encountered it. So if you were able to catch a monk seal that had toxo in time that it looked distressed or whatever, someone alerted, it's brought into the center. Would you be able to give the animal treatment for toxo? Like would give humans treatment for toxo? We can treat for toxo. The majority of the cases that have come stranded with toxo have unfortunately died within the first few days of their stranding. So really no significant treatment was able to be administered. We have had two patients that have come in in the last two years that were with us for about six weeks of treatment. But again, unfortunately, we weren't able to knock back that inflammation enough to be able to save those two individuals. It is something that we are exploring and trying to develop new ways of treating, trying to talk within our community to get new ideas of how we could potentially combat some of that inflammation and have a better outcome for those animals. I mean, I guess maybe if there was some kind of program that went around and probably there is that they go around and they neuter these cats or spay them, then they can't reproduce. Because there's so many in Oahu and on the other islands, that's part of the problem. So I don't, I mean, I think there's a program like that, but I do wanna talk about the fishing gear and how people can prevent that. There's also other plastic, I'm sure, that the seals are being maybe eating and everything. So I did want you to talk a little bit about that because I think that's something that humans really can do to try to prevent these seals from being caught in their fishing gear. It seems so logical just to not throw your fishing gear in the water. So I don't know if you can talk about that. What kind of things can happen to seals with the fishing gear? I know they get entangled, they can eat it, right? Yeah, absolutely. There's, just like you said, there's different ways that those animals can interact with that fishing gear and have it cause harm or be life threatening. So one of those is entanglement. And certainly proper disposal of fishing gear is really, really important. And not just fishing gear, any kind of ocean trash they can get, we see entanglements with things like packing straps, things like that. So even just making sure that you cut that packing strap so that it doesn't have an encircling loop and disposing of it properly. Those are all important steps that we can take to make sure that that doesn't cause any detriment to a marine animal or any animal. And then fishing gear, like people, monk seals will sometimes take advantage of an easy meal. So if they see a fish on a line, they may come towards your line. If you see a monk seal, approaching a fishing line, certainly try to reel it in if you can. If you do have an animal that takes your fish and potentially ingests your hook, we strongly encourage folks to report that to the NOAA Stranding hotline. It's not to penalize anyone in any way, it's to know that there's a monk seal out there with possibly an ingested hook so that our teams can be ready to respond because there are things that we can do to mitigate those sorts of interactions. And other things include using barbless hooks because if they do ingest it, that'll cause less drama to any of those animals. So there's lots of little steps that we can take to help protect those animals. And certainly if you see a monk seal in the area, if you can choose a different fishing spot, all those little steps. And I'm also wondering about what's been going on in Molokai. I don't know if there's any more light as to how these monk seals were killed there or what happened. I don't know if you could shed some light on that. I don't have much to share. So those are active ongoing investigations. So it's not something that our organization is really primarily responsible for. So we certainly do support the network as much as we can, but I don't have a whole lot of information to share there. And then I'm wondering just out of curiosity, how you got into taking care of these marine animals. It seems like a fascinating job, but did you decide, did you know when you became a vet, this is what you wanted to do or what happened? Yeah, I was pretty fortunate. I didn't necessarily know that monk seals were the animal that I wanted to work on and only that animal. But I did always want to be involved in ocean conservation. I had a father who was a marine biologist, so I caught the bug early. And then just throughout life, loved working with animals and wanted to become a veterinarian. And there's fortunately a way to kind of marry those two things. So here I am. The animals, when they're born, I just wanted to go through sort of their whole life cycle. They kind of breastfeed for about six months, is that true? And then they're weaned and they're solitary. And how long do they usually live for here in the home? It's a little bit shorter of a nursing period, actually. It's about six to eight weeks. Yeah, so they don't get as much maternal care. But same thing, their mothers have a very high percentage of fat within that milk. So they gain weight very quickly and then they're left to their own devices after that six to eight week period. And they typically spend about a month on the beach kind of figuring out how to forge on their own, get better at swimming, and then they're off. And then they can live to be about 25 to 30 years old. Wow, does that usually happen here? That's a good question, I'm not sure. I'm not sure what percentage of the population lives to that age. How do you know how old the monk seal is? Is there any way for you to know when the monk seal comes in, how old it is? You can just have an estimation or? Yeah, we actually know a fair amount about the monk seal population here. And that's largely because of the Hawaiian monk seal research program, which is a part of NOAA Fisheries. They have been monitoring this population for several decades and have been able to tag nearly every individual, not everyone. You can't always catch everyone when they're pups, but they've been able to tag a lot of the pups as they've been born over the years. So we have a lot of information about individual animals here. And especially within the main Hawaiian islands because there are folks here and we do have these organizations like the Marine Mammal Center that respond to calls of monk seals. We have been collecting data over the years about where those monk seals like to spend their time, who's spending their time where and who's potentially interacting with who. So we have a pretty good amount of information about monk seals compared to a lot of other seal populations. And how long do the, I'm just wondering with the monk seals, how many are there in the Hawaiian islands right now? Yeah, so there's roughly 1400 monk seals alive today. And the majority of those monk seals actually live in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. So about 1100 animals are in the Northwestern Hawaiian islands and then within the main Hawaiian islands, we have about 300 to 400 monk seals that live here. Wow, this has been a great episode. I mean, I feel like I'd love to have you on again. So much information, but yeah, we're out of time and we'll have to wrap it up now. But I wanted to just say, you know, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm Dr. Grace O'Neill. This is Healthy Planet on the Think Tech Live Streaming Network series. We've been talking with Dr. Sophie Worisky at the Pacific Marine Mammal Center. Thank you for all being here. Thank you, Mike, for engineering our session and the rest of the crew at Think Tech for hosting our show. And thanks to you, our listeners for listening. I'll see you on April 28th for more of Healthy Planet on Think Tech, the show for people who care about their health and the health of our planet. Our next show will be about dogs going vegan, featuring a member of the VDog team. If you have ideas for the show, please contact me at Healthy Planet, thinktech at gmail.com. Check out my website at graceandhawaii.com for more information on my projects, including future show guests. I'm Dr. Grace O'Neill. Aloha, everyone. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo. Thank you.